I am very new to programming and eager to learn. I have been messing with a kinect now for awhile and recently came across V-REP. I have gone through all the tutorials and I was curious as to an approach or general framework of how to connect my Kinect (hardware) to simulate with V-REP. My end goal is to use my arm to control a 4 dof robot arm. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

The Windows version of V-REP comes with a Kinect model (located in models/other/interface to kinect) that allows to connect to the real Kinect and retrieve its data. The model will simply launch a server application via a child script. The child script will then via TCP connection connect to the server and retrieve skeleton information. Refer to the project files located in programming/windowsOnlyProjects/kinectServer.

An other method is to write a plugin for V-REP. The plugin will link to the kinect libraries and retrieve useful data. That data can then be made available to any other controller within or outside of V-REP (i.e. child script). The plugin can do this by registering custom Lua commands to the scripts, such as simExtGetKinectSkeletonData(...). Refer to one of the plugin projects, such as the one located in programming/v_repExtBubbleRob.

A third method is to write an executable that handles the Kinect reading. Then, include the remote API functionality to it. You can do this by following the instructions here. Then, you can send kinect data over to V-REP via for instance the simxAppendStringSignal, or another mechanism.